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5/23/2013
By MARK STEVENSON / Associated Press
LA RUANA, Mexico—The farm state of Michoacan is burning. A drug cartel that takes its name from an ancient monastic order has set fire to lumber yards, packing plants and passenger buses in a medieval-like reign of terror.
The Knights Templar cartel is extorting protection payments from cattlemen, lime growers and businesses such as butchers, prompting some communities to fight back, taking up arms in vigilante patrols.
Lime picker Alejandro Ayala chose to seek help from the law instead. After the cartel forced him out of work by shutting down fruit [...]
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5/23/2013
It happened recently in Bogotoa, Colombia, in a TransMilenio (Bus Rapid Transit) station.
0:15 The thief, in yellow, and an accomplice.
0:21 The victim, totally immersed in her cell phone.
0:30 The thief activates the opening of the security gates, preparing an escape route.
0:34 The thief approaches the victim.
0:36 The struggle for the cell phone.
0:44 The victim falls and the thief starts running away with the cell phone.
0:47 WHAM!!!
0:49 Note how the girls in the station turn their heads to avoid watching the scene.
1:01 In the middle of the confusion, the [...]
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5/22/2013
By Beau Kilmer / New York Times
Much of the marijuana consumed in the U.S. comes from Mexico. It’s impossible to know exactly, but my colleagues and I put the range at 40 to 67 percent for 2008. Our research also suggests that legalizing commercial marijuana production at the national level could drive out most of the marijuana imported from Mexico.
With marijuana legalization at the state level, imports from Mexico would depend on several factors, like how taxes influenced the market price, whether legally sold marijuana were illegally diverted to other states, and the severity of [...]
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Drug Cartels Running Command and Control Operations Out of North Texas
DEA says high-level cartel members now direct drug shipments from Dallas to cities all over the country
5/22/2013
By Scott Friedman / NBC 5
Trouble came rolling into town and landed squarely in one Seagoville neighborhood.
One neighbor told NBC 5 Investigates he saw federal agents surround a neighbor’s home and then, a short time later, carry out bags full of cash.
The men that lived at the home were not your average street-level drug dealers.
The current residents of the house showed NBC 5 Investigates a [...]
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Another article related to the Army deployments in Michoacan
5/21/2013
By Tracy Wilkinson / Los Angeles Times
MEXICO CITY — The Mexican government poured army troops — and high-level delegations — into western Mexico on Tuesday in a bid to take back control of a region long besieged by a deadly drug cartel.
The operation in the Pacific state of Michoacan is the first major military deployment targeting drug traffickers to be ordered by the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto, which is still struggling to publicly define its security strategy six months after assuming leadership of this [...]
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5/21/2013
by Mark Stevenson / AP
Mexico’s top security officials gathered Tuesday in the western state of Michoacan to launch a campaign with thousands of army troops to rescue towns besieged, sometimes for months, by the powerful Knights Templar drug cartel.
Interior Secretary Miguel Osorio Chong and his national security team met with local officials in the state capital of Morelia at a time of escalating tension in Michoacan, where communities mistrustful of state authorities have been creating their own vigilante forces for protection against the cartels.
But it was unclear that sending troops to Michoacan, which is [...]
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5/21/2013
Karl Ritter / AP
PETARE, Venezuela: Stern-looking soldiers clutching assault rifles wave down the beat-up Chevy Caprice entering this sprawling slum on the outskirts of Caracas.
Flashlights in his face, the driver steps out and places his hands on the roof while the soldiers frisk him for drugs and weapons.
He’s clean, and a hand gesture from the commanding officer sends him off into the maze of ramshackle homes that is Petare, one of the most dangerous parts of Venezuela’s notoriously crime-infested capital.
Since Monday, this scene is playing out day and night at dozens of military [...]
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The former U.S. attorney in Arizona leaked an internal report about an ATF agent who had criticized the failed gun operation.
21/05/2013
by Richard A. Serrano / Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — The former top federal prosecutor in Arizona retaliated against the lead whistle-blower in the Fast and Furious gun-smuggling scandal by leaking an internal report that suggested the whistle-blower once favored allowing illegal gun sales as a way to track weapons to drug cartels in Mexico, the Justice Department’s inspector general’s office said Monday.
Dennis K. Burke, who resigned from the U.S. attorney’s office following the Fast [...]
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5/20/2013
LA RUANA, Michoacan (AP) — Residents of a western Mexico town who endured months besieged by a drug cartel are cheering the arrival of hundreds of Mexican soldiers.
People in La Ruana in Michoacan state lined the main road Monday to greet more than a dozen troop transports and heavily armed Humvees with applause and cheers.
La Ruana’s supplies had been blocked by the Knights Templars cartel, which declared war on the hamlet after residents formed self-defense squads and drove the cartel out of the town.
On Monday, the leader of the self-defense movement agreed to stop [...]
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5/20/2013
By Matt Canham / The Salt Lake Tribune
WASHINGTON – Somewhere in the remote wilderness of southern Utah on land controlled by the federal government, members of a Mexican cartel are putting marijuana plants in the earth in hopes of reaping a multi-million dollar harvest this fall.
And it eats at the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Sue Thomas.
“They have taken over our public lands. They have no stake in Utah,’ she said. “They are here to use and abuse our public lands for their own profit,’ she said.
These illegal flash farms are a pervasive problem in [...]
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